Leave the Movie Previews Alone

A half-hour of previews and a commute ballooned the last movie I saw in a theater — the cozy two-hour-and-12-minute Nosferatu — well past a three-hour time commitment. The standard trailers, the Noovie trivia crap, and, more recently, product ads (Pepsi? Honda?? Chick-fil-A???) that now run before feature presentations all feel longer, louder, and more annoying than ever before. It’s gotten so bad that last month, a Connecticut state senator introduced a bill that would require theaters to disclose exactly how long the previews are, empowering moviegoers to more easily avoid them entirely. “If they want to get there early and watch the promos, they can,” State Senator Martin Looney told the state’s regional paper, the Register Citizen. “But if they just want to see the feature, they ought to be able to get there just in time for that.”

As well intentioned as Looney’s bill may be, it’s a terrible idea. First and foremost, these ads help movie theaters break even. As the pandemic reminded us, the theatrical-business model can be precarious, and advertising is often a significant piece of any exhibitor’s financial pie. According to one estimate from the ad firm Blue Line Media, a 30-second ad running over four weeks could earn a movie theater between $2,000 and $3,000 — or more. Peter H. Gistelinck, executive director of the Stamford nonprofit Avon Theatre, noted the importance of ads and previews to his bottom line to the Register Citizen’s reporter: “Announcing the start time of the actual movie would … have a direct negative impact on our financial stability in an already so challenging environment,” he said. The single-page bill introduced by Looney doesn’t acknowledge or address how this would affect theatrical businesses at all. Not every exhibitor is AMC or Cinemark, but the bill as written doesn’t differentiate; burdening smaller theaters with rules of this sort would likely drive your already high admission prices even higher. The money has to come from somewhere.

It’s also not just about the money. There’s a precious social contract to watching previews, one critical to the larger moviegoing experience. I can’t remember most of the trailers from that Nosferatu screening because my friends and I knew to avoid them by walking into the screening room about ten minutes late — well after the listed start time but not too late that we risked cutting into the running time. Then my friend talked my ear off, making fun of several of the trailers. In that window of time, the lights may be slightly dimmed, but you can still chat. You can also flirt with a date, make fun of shitty trailers, get excited for fun ones, arrive late, come and go as you please, crack open your crinkly snacks, answer texts, check email, and maybe even hazard a quick call without irritating most of your fellow moviegoers. These are the commercials, after all! During the movie itself, such shenanigans should be punishable by ejection; during the previews, they aren’t just savvy time management — they’re part of what binds us to the cinema in the first place.

Looney has characterized the previews as “an abuse of people’s time,” but I prefer to focus on their liminal nature: In spite of the capitalist audiovisual assault, they ease us from the outside world into the shared experience of watching a film in community. I am not interested in trading that time for a new dynamic in which the concessions staff and the rows in front of me are inevitably overwhelmed by even tardier filmgoers. In that scenario, they’ll wait until the first or second scene of the movie — instead of the first or second trailer — to crowd into the theater. Now that would be an abuse of the time I actually paid for.